Grace called twice. I hung up on her both times. She worried me. I knew she was priming herself all the time, and eventually something would happen, but I couldn’t let myself think about that. Not till I could angle something. Grace had been terrific while it lasted. She was a tall, blonde dish, and she’d been in the process of getting a divorce when I met her one evening at the store. She bought a phonograph. She looked good. We talked ourselves into a date for the next night, and after that things were underway with what you might call a bang.
She would say, “Jack, I’ve been married for five years. Believe it or not. I feel as if I’ve been dead all that time.”
“You’re not dead,” I’d say. “Take it from me.”
And she would laugh. I didn’t realize she was serious, possessive, watchful—suspicious. She was fun. In the beginning. She’d always had enough money, she still had plenty to get along with, even though she didn’t tag the ex-husband for alimony. We had a hot time for a while. I told her I went for her in a big way. I was really just trying to make her happy. She didn’t know that. I didn’t think it mattered.
It mattered.
She began to haunt me. On the phone. At the store. At the apartment. She wanted to be with me every minute. She crawled. About that time, I didn’t want to be with her at all. She wasn’t fun anymore.
“When you going to ask me to marry you?” she’d say. Only she meant it. It was all she thought of. She was neurotic, searching for the perfect husband-lover-understander. I’d played it all wrong. I told her so. I cursed her. I hit her. Nothing did any good. Sometimes she scared me, the way she acted, the wild things she said.
And lately, the phone calls, stopping me in the street. “I’ll kill myself. I mean it, Jack. You can’t treat me this way. You love me. You told me you loved me.”
Jesus! She’d been married wrong once; she would never learn.
I was at the apartment when the phone rang. I thought it was Grace again. It was Shirley Angela. It was like getting everything you’d ever wanted, all in one lump.
“I phoned the store. They finally gave me your apartment number.”
“Don’t do that again.”
“I’ve got to see you.”
“All right.” I tried to sound calm.
“It’s four-thirty now. The doctor will be here in a few minutes. I’ll come to your place.”
“No.”
Her voice was strained. “I’ve got to see you.” She paused and I didn’t speak, and she said, “You were right, Jack. Of course, you were right.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to go back to the store for a while. I won’t be free till six.”
“That’s a whole hour and a half from now.”
“One hundred and sixty-eight and a half hours, total.”
Silence.
“That doesn’t give me much time,” she said. “Doctor Miraglia said he can’t stay long tonight.”
I made no comment.
“Where shall I meet you?” she said.
“Drive out to Maximo Point, on the bay. Take the boulevard until it bears right. You’ll see a brick street to the left. Keep on that till it quits. There’s a sulphur spring down there. I’ll see you.”
“I know the place. Jack, are you angry?”
“No. I was, but I’m not anymore. Are you all right?”
“I will be.”
I didn’t have to go down to the store, and I couldn’t figure what made me tell her that. I wished I hadn’t. I wanted to see her so bad I couldn’t even think, and if the days had seemed a long while before she called, it was really beginning to stretch now.
I took the car and drove out to Maximo Point and waited. The sun hung low over the Gulf. I was parked by the sea wall under a sprawling live oak, and the late afternoon was quiet, with only the occasional distant scream of a gull. I sat there, more nervous with every minute. I heard a car.
She was driving. It was only a little after five, which told me the condition I was in. Maybe she had known I didn’t have to go to the store. The car was a new Imperial sedan, sleek and black. She rocked it to a stop beside me, ran around, opened the door of my car, and jumped in. She closed the door and sat there.
She looked straight ahead at the windshield, with her chin up a little. I didn’t say anything and she didn’t look at me. Then she spoke, her voice soft and hesitant and shaded with resignation.
“All right,” she said. “You win. You were right.”
“What do I win?”
She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “It was a shock, having you tell me what I was thinking, like that. To my face.”
“You were pretty obvious.”
She sat stiffly. “I didn’t mean to be.”
Looking at her, I felt the lust crawling in me, a kind of liquid heat that spread in my loins. She was soft and eager, and hungry for life. It made her more vital to me, and I knew I would go through a lot to have that always. I didn’t care what she was.
“Why me?” I said. “I’m a stranger to you.”
“You’re very quaint, dear.”
“All right. How can you trust me?”
“What is there to trust? You mean I should be afraid of you going to Victor with what you think? Or perhaps suggesting things to the police?” She turned on the seat, regarding me coolly. “That would be a laugh, Victor would very likely hit you over the head with an oxygen tank.” She paused and a smile touched the corners of her lips. “Besides, if he didn’t, I would.”
“No hokum. This is serious.”
She said nothing for a moment. Her eyes were steady and cool. “Listen,” she said. “I’m going to be serious. I think we understand each other very well, Jack. I mean by that, I don’t believe either of us have any illusions concerning morality. Am I right?”
“Let’s say you’re right.”
“I am right, darling—so very right. Tell you something, now. I did want the TV sets, and the speakers, the intercom units, for the house. But I’m not going to lie. I wanted the other, too.” She leaned slightly toward me and there was a shade of bitterness in her tone. “I’ve been through hell with that man, taking care of him—I won’t go into that now. It’s too damned sordid. Suffice to say the past few years have been a prison for me. I’ve had very few acquaintances, none of the kind I’ve wanted, let alone anyone I could call a friend. I’ve been lonely. I don’t have time for anything but taking care of him.” Her voice tensed. “Alone all the time, like that, you get to doing things, thinking things, and sometimes you actually believe you’ll go crazy.”
“I can understand that.”
“Yes. Can you understand this? I like to lie on my back with a man on top of me.”
“I sort of guessed that the other day.”
She showed me her teeth, gleaming and white and maybe even predatory, between the red lips. Sometimes the things she said seemed to come from movies she might have seen, or novels she might have read. But it didn’t matter. She said, “That’s one of the things I like about you. We’re a pair, Jack. It’s hot and it will stay hot.” She hesitated, then said, “So I wanted the TV sets, but I counted on the other, too. I planned for it. I thought of a lot of ways, and it seemed the best. Lots of things could always go wrong with the TV sets, or other things I’d buy. I didn’t give a damn who it was. A man, that’s all, see?” Her face wasn’t pretty when she said that. You didn’t want it pretty, either. She breathed shallowly, her eyes clear and young and bright. “If it didn’t look as if it would work out right, then I’d try another place, until I found what I wanted. I didn’t imagine it would be too difficult, if I made things obvious. Only you were different. I would have waited a long time.”
“Oh, sure.”
Her voice was low and tight. “You looked me over and liked what you saw, and you thought about it. You listened to every word I said, and thought about that. You considered every angle till I thought I’d go crazy. Like how old I was, and everything.” She gave me that sly look along her eyes. “I told you all about Victor, so you’d know how it was with me. His having an attack when he did was timed just right. You think I needed your help, taking care of him? I could do that in my sleep. But I knew you’d be sure then that I did have it tough, and maybe I’d like to play around.”